Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerJoel Stevenson (right) comes out of the Federal Courthouse in Newark with his attorney John Yauch (left) in this March file photo. Stevenson and three others who are part of Wiseguy Tickets Inc. are accused of defrauding and hacking ticket vendors.

Lawyers for three California men who ran an online ticket-reselling business asked a federal judge in Newark today to dismiss charges accusing them of illegally buying up legions of premium tickets to concerts and ball games.

The officials from Wiseguy Tickets Inc. are accused of hacking into websites of Ticketmaster, Major League Baseball and other companies to grab premium seats for Yankee playoff games, the Rose Bowl and concerts including Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.

The company sold the tickets at a steep mark-up to brokers, earning more than $29 million between 2002 and 2009, authorities said.

But defense lawyers told U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden that Wiseguy Tickets simply devised a lightning-fast way to buy tickets for brokers, who resold them to fans. They say the indictment charging them with wire fraud and other crimes is loaded with “buzzwords” to make it appear the men broke the law by violating terms of service established by companies including Ticketmaster, now called Live Nation Entertainment.

“It is a creative indictment,” said Mark Rush, an attorney for Wiseguy's founder, Kenneth Lowson, of Los Angeles.

But authorities say Lowson and his three co defendants committed fraud by using 100,000 internet protocol addresses, a variety of company names, hundreds of e-mails and credit-card numbers to hide the fact that all the tickets were bought by a single company.

“Each and every step of the way they lied,” said Erez Liebermann, an assistant U.S. attorney. “Every step of the way, it is traditional fraud.”

Lowson was arrested in March along with Kristofer Kirsch and Joel Stevenson. All three men are free on bail. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison. A fourth suspect fled to Indonesia and remains at large.